Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of computer graphics and, in particular, to a learning-based clothing model used to animate detailed character garments (or other fabrics) in real time.
Description of the Related Art
In a computer gaming environment, generating images from a set of world and object geometry can be a complex task. A game engine needs to determine interactions between elements of geometry, compute physics for objects in the environment, respond to user input, compute actions for non-player characters, determine what elements are visible, among other things, all while rendering images at an acceptable frame-rate. This complexity makes it very difficult to render certain visual elements in a scene, such as clothing, water, hair, and smoke with a realistic appearance. In particular, rendering clothing or garments on a human (or non-human) character in order to drape the moving character has proven to be difficult.
Clothing simulation techniques can produce stunningly realistic examples of detailed folding and rich knit textures. However, these approaches typically require high resolution meshes to represent fine detail, complex time-stepping methods to avoid instability, as well as expensive nonlinear solvers to resolve collisions. Therefore, real-time applications, such as animation prototyping, training simulations and computer games, are unable to use these approaches, as they cannot generate results in real time.
Instead, video games (and other real-time rendering applications) typically rely on fast, low-dimensional, coarse models or tight-skinning models that render garments in a fixed space relative to character pose and position. It would be useful to combine the benefits of low-dimensional representations, which can be rendered in real-time, with the expressive power of detailed high resolution cloth models. Interactive applications also require stability over long time-steps while maintaining collision constraints.